On Sept. 14, when I had lunch with Westboro-based SimpliVity CEO, Doron Kempel – his company makes a box that boosts the efficiency of corporate data storage – he flashed me the business card of John Doerr, a partner of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and the most prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley during the 1990s.

That card was his signal to me that Kleiner Perkins – whose early stage investments include Amazon, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Symantec and VeriSign – was the big-name investor whose name he did not want me to publish until the embargo was lifted on the news at 6 a.m. today.

But now the news is out that SimpliVity raised $25 million in a so-called Series B round of venture capital – after seed and Series A rounds – from Kleiner Perkins, as well as existing investors Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures. This investment brings to $43 million the amount of capital invested in SimpliVity, a mere month after the company emerged from so-called stealth mode.

In a Sept. 21 interview with Matt Murphy, the Kleiner Perkins partner and Stanford Business School graduate who will serve on SimpliVity's board, I was on the receiving end of a firehose of words attempting to explain why his firm invested in SimpliVity. My interpretation is that Mr. Murphy invested for three reasons: He believes that SimpliVity is attacking a large market; that its technology provides uniquely valuable performance improvements for customers; and that Mr. Kempel is a leader who is good at making a plan and motivating his team to execute it.

Mr. Murphy started off by describing two kinds of corporate computing: Vertical and horizontal. As I understood him, vertical refers to the idea that when companies need more computing power, they add stacks of boxes from different vendors – including EMC, Hewlett Packard, and many others that perform specific computing functions – such as data storage and retrieval and routing of Internet traffic.

Mr. Murphy notes that horizontal approach is different because it lets companies “scale out instead of scaling up.” SimpliVity's OmniCube product uses the horizontal approach, which Mr. Murphy believes is very valuable to companies because it means that they can expand their computing capacity at a lower cost. More specifically, the OmniCube combines all the functions of the different vertical boxes in a way that makes it cheaper for companies to buy and to operate each day.

Mr. Murphy echoed what Mr. Kempel said about the operating cost advantages of the horizontal approach that SimpliVity uses. Specifically, in order to manage the expansion of a company's computing capability, its IT department needs people “with PhDs” in each of the functional disciplines – such as data storage and routing – because the technical problems of expanding are so complex. While Mr. Murphy has concluded that large companies can afford to pay such experts, small and medium-sized companies cannot. Therefore, the value of horizontal approaches such as the one that SimplVity provides becomes clearer – those SMBs can expand their computing capacity without paying those PhDs, since the OmniCube is technically easier to operate.

Mr. Murphy believes that SimpliVity is targeting the $100 billion market for so-called cloud-based computing. The cloud refers to renting computing capacity from another firm – Amazon has an entire business dedicated to this, for example. And Mr. Murphy expects horizontal computing to take a huge amount of vertical computing's share in the cloud. Specifically, he expects horizontal's share to grow “from between 10 percent to 20 percent to 80 percent by 2022.”

And Mr. Murphy does not see any meaningful competition. “SimpliVity has a massive lead,” he said.

He notes that one other vendor has developed a “converged appliance” – meaning its hardware performs many of the functions of all the different boxes I mentioned before. However, that converged appliance lacks specific capabilities that SimpliVity provides.

Among the most important of those is that SimpliVity reduces the volume of data that companies need to store and retrieve through de-deduplication and compression. And that means lower costs and less complexity for corporate customers.

Finally, Mr. Murphy notes that Mr. Kempel is “an execution machine.” By that, Murphy means that the former Major in the Israel Defense Forces excels at developing a detailed battle plan and getting everyone on his team to agree to the plan and to complete their assigned tasks on time.

Mr. Kempel started and sold companies to Dell and IBM, which said of Mr. Kempel's Diligent Technologies “it's the biggest little company we've ever acquired” – earning attractive returns for their investors.

Mr. Murphy expects that Mr. Kempel will use that execution machine to give Kleiner Perkins and the other SimpliVity investors another big investment win.